The punishment has to be a bit above the retail price. Limit it to something small, like 3x the lowest street price or some specific number, whichever is higher. Higher for commercial copyright infringement, of course.
Any fixed price is going to wind up being just as unrealistic, sooner or later.
If the liability limit is the retail price, that would kill GNU and similar copyleft licenses.
For a commercial copyright infringer all you'd need to do would be to use the price that infringer was selling at as the starting point.
Actually, there are multiple instances of courts telling the RIAA to stop certain practices of theirs and the RIAA simply ignoring the judge's orders in another court.
But until a judge decides to "throw the book at them" why should they stop?
Now if your ISP got one of such letters, they may have the choice of:
1) sending you an email and asking you to cease and desist in accordance with the request from the RIAA;
2) providing the details to the RIAA and say "your problem";
3) disconnect you and say to the RIAA "problem fixed." BR>They also have additional options of
4) ignoring the letter
5) invoicing the RIAA for their time
A good start would be for them to publicly condemn acts of terrorism by muslims. Have you noticed that whenever a christian commits an atrocious act in the name of their religion, the pope or someone immediately condemn the act?
The Catholic Church is somewhat unusual in that it has a hierarchical structure. Though I don't recall any Pope routinely condeming the IRA.
As far as I know, nothing like that has ever happened with muslims.
There is no Islamic equivalent of a "pope" or even an "archbishop".
Aren't name/SSN/DoB/address examples of "something you know"? "something you have" typically refers to physical objects such as dongles and cards.
Rather these are things many people know. Which makes them more suitable as "identifiers" than "authenticators". About the only way such "well known facts" could possibly be usable for authentication would be if fairly obscure ones were picked at random.
and it's not unexpected. If you blow the whistle on illegal activities the perpetrators of the crime will harass you and your family to pay you back.
Or people who see themselves as somehow allied with the perpetrator(s). It appears to be quite a common law enforcement response to "high crimes" to be more interested in persuing witnesses than the actual wrongdoer.
The feds are simply punishing him and his family for outing their illegal activities. nothing different than what the organized crime people will do...
It's also similar to cases of people videoing cops doing something wrong, even illegal. Where the police come up with creative interpretations of "wiretapping" in order to arrest the witness. As opposed to doing anything about the police officer in question.
well except they kill everyone, the Feds are not at that level yet.
Only because too many "suicides" wouldn't be credible.
Society's debt to these people has been paid, and it's time for them to live up to their side of the bargain. If they weren't prepared to do that, no-one forced them to share their work: they could have gone out and got a day job that pays the bills like everyone else, and they could still be living in obscurity and doing that job today like everyone else too.
Thing is that 50 years is already longer than the typical "working life". Just about everyone, if they live that long, has less than 50 years combined in "day jobs" before they retire and draw some kind of pension. Where the amount of their pension is in some way related to the money they earned when they were working. In other words these "artists" would now be drawing their pension in obscurity by now:)
The writing style sucketh mightily, but the idea behind it is gold. Extending copyright to certain expressions for too long is just plain stupid.
There are a huge number of things which are good in moderation whilst being harmful in excess. Even if moderate copyright was a good thing excess copyright would actually be worst than no copyright.
Time we acknowledge that with a reduction, to 20 years, of copyright.
If everything were molten, it wouldn't leave any regions behind, because molten magma/lava would fill in the gouge fairly quickly. Kind of like scooping water out of a bucket doesn't leave a big score; the water level just goes down.
Something which is "fluid" dosn't even have to be in a liquid state. You'd observe much the same with a bucket of sand which was being intermmitently shaken.
But that's the problem. It's exactly backwards. If you teach somebody about computers, they can pretty much teach themselves how to use them in practical application. Primary schools should be starting with fundamental concepts, not middle-management or office-drone routines and habits.
It doesn't work backwards, either. Teaching somebody how to use Word doesn't teach them much about the fundamentals of computing.
It probably isn't even going to be much use using whatever software is going to be around in 10-15 years from now. Whilst there might be some value in older teenage (and above) students learning specific details of currently used pieces of software this isn't education it's training. Training students how to use something which almost certainly be obsolete before they finish their education appears to be rather a waste of time for everyone involved.
The problem is thinking that information can be a physical good. It is not. You can store it on a physical media, but is is never physical by itself.
And this is not as if it were a new idea of yours. It was considered -and rejected, about 2500 years ago. Information, like shape, can be stored or represented on a physical media, but it is not the physical substance on itself.
If people, lacking the technology we now have to record information and move information between different media, could work this out then it really should be a "no brainer" to anyone now living.
Yes, but they don't go around confiscating discs, and writing strongly worded letters.
Or making claims about the legal status of software which they are completly unqualified to make.
Is anyone else reminded of the religous teacher confiscating a biology book from a student, and writing a letter to their pro-evolution parents?
But did this teacher claim that the biology book was "illegal"? Wonder if any science teachers were tempted to confiscate religious texts from students:)
If I remember correctly, this is roughly what happened next. A day or two later, as I was browsing the Internet with Firefox, an ad popped up saying that they had detected several types of viruses and spyware running on my computer. It then asked if I want to have my hard disk scanned for viruses. I closed the advertisement without giving permission. Then another pop-up, with a progress bar, appeared, which claimed that it as scanning drive C: for viruses. I thought, that was odd, since Linux computers do not have a drive C. Before long, a pop-up appeared which said that Microsoft had detected references to viruses and spyware in my registry. That also seemed odd, since Linux does not even have a registry. Furthermore, I thought, what was a Microsoft pop-up doing on my Linux computer. Besides, at least last that I have heard, there still have not yet been any Linux viruses successfully circulating in the wild.
Finally, they asked me to click on a link and purchase their product, so that my computer could be disinfected. At no point in the process of supposedly scanning my hard disk without permission, did they seem to notice or comment on the fact that I was using Linux.
It wouldn't be that hard for these crooks to have this only happen if you your browser had a Windows user agent string. That they can't even be bothered to do this means that they arn't scared of being caught. That their lies are so obvious should be exactly the sort of evidence that prosecutors should be looking for... Regular con artists tend to be far more subtle with their lying.
The "scan" is totally bogus -- it "ran" in my SeaMonkey browser under Linux and "detected" various infected DLLs. Since I don't have any DLLs on my system, the "scan" is obviously a scam.
As would be the case if it offered to "scan your registry". No doubt even on a Windows system such sites could list DLLs or registry keys which don't actually exist on the system in question. This is like phishing emails where you may not even have an account with the bank in question and even if you do you never told them that email. Or even someone phoning up, claiming to be your Uncle John who needs money in a hurry. Where even if you actually have an uncle called "John" the caller sounds nothing like them. Technology such as telephones, email, websites, etc Should be acting as a double edged sword. In that whilst it allows such crooks the the ability to target more people than if they had to physically visit people in order to try and con them, as was their only option in the past. It at the same time tends to leave trails back to the criminals. Thus it should be easier for law enforcement to do something about them. If law enforcement were actually interested in doing so that is...
After all, keep in mind that there were a million people that were esentially tricked into pulling out their creditcard and paying money to these people.
How long should it take for governments (who now own a fair amount of the banking industry) to tell banks to block such transaction? It must be easier for law enforcement to "follow the money" that when it's someone going door to door wanting payment in cash.
Well of course you don't see something like that for an ad. The advertisers are PAYING real money.
Is money which is the procedes of criminal activity "real money" in the first place... What do you think would happen if this money was from a bank robbery, belived to be from selling illegal drugs or from "Internet gambling"? The last time I looked this kind of fraud is against criminal law in most countries. These kind of crooks should be living in fear of police raids in the early morning or having to be very careful where they travel if they operate from a "safe country". Not court orders to "behave or else we'll tell you again" or even private individuals complaining to their ISP. Similarly advertising companies should expect that they accept money from criminals there will be police taking a very close interest in them and their accounts.
Alas, if you give people a lot of power, they will abuse it.
Be it a case of power corrupting or power attracting the corrupt/easily corruptable. The easiest way around this is randomly selected group of people to decide a specific issue. (Often known as a jury.) The power these people have is limited both in scope and duration, so minimal risk of it corrupting them. If selection is properly random you are unlikely to get a group of people who are all corrupt or power seeking.
People actually did this in Finland, and managed to find all the content on the blacklist. They also showed that only about 1% of the blacklist was actually illegal.
Which resulted in the webpage of the person who announced this being added to the list. Both of which indicate that proper oversight is needed. Even a 1% false positive rate should be considered very poor. Either this list should have been 1% of the size it was or there were a lot of false negatives. The methods used to check the list only identified false positives...
I don't know what happens in the UK and the rest of Europe, but I know here in australia they have already passed an amendment to the freedom of information act to *exclude* the internet blacklist from any FOI requests.
Where are all the "If you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear" crowd? Or have reports of them all camped on Kevin Rudd's doorstep been censored:)
The thing I don't understand is why they're not targeting people offering real child porn?
It's hard work. Or at least hard work compared with setting up a website and asking people to submit URLs. There probably isn't much in the way of easy detective work.
Last year I gave up moderating a hub on Direct Connect. One of the reasons was I couldn't be bothered banning users who were sharing child porn all the time. I'd come home from work, type in a list a 20 words relating to child porn
How many words are there which are uniquely related?
o That the "blocks" that the major ISPs have in place are effectively useless; either they're incompetent as well, or (more likely) are paying lip-service to the whole idea by saying "yes, we subscribe to the IWF block-list" while using mechanisms a five-year-old could bypass.
They were about as effective as many of the forms of "DRM" used by entertainments and games software industries. Trivial for the people who want to bypass them, whilst causing all sorts of problems for everyone else. About the only good thing is that a few more people may now realise that the same is likely to be the case for the British Government's grandiose ID card idea.
Sometimes (as in the case of dodgy 70s album covers), this seems just a bit of a joke; but sometimes it isn't.
Underneath there is a rather disturbing conspiracy involving ISPs who's customers are a large proportion of the British population to trust the judgment of a handful of people. Something which would be a bad idea even if these people were the most sane and level headed on the planet.
During the early 90s spokesmen for the political wings of the terrorist organisations in the North of Ireland had to be re-voiced by actors, making interviews essentially impossible. I remember one occasion, after a particular gruesome bombing (many innocent people killed) when the spokesman concerned was able to hide behind the actor to get his message across without answering WHY his organisation supported this indiscriminate slaughter.
Almost as soon as this rule was brought in journalists said "This means that that the next time the IRA does something we can't ask Gerry Adams to justify it." IIRC the revoicing by actors was exploiting a loophole in the legislation.
IWF has decided to make an exception for this particular image, but the underlying attitude that led to its blocking remains the same. If not for the public scrutiny this particular decision has prompted, the image in question would still be blocked. I find that very disturbing.
One thing which caused this scrutiny is that the actions taken affected a huge number of people who wern't even trying to view the image in question. (As well as not doing an especially effective job of blocking the image in question.) This would be akin to having police checkpoints on every road into a city because some criminal might possibly want to travel there.
The biggest problem I see with this sort of filtering is the fact that, at least for borderline cases, you rarely know whether the image being blocked is actually illegal.
In this case there appear to have been attempts to make the blocking look like a technical failure.
Usually it takes the due process of law to determine that a person producing an image has done something illegal, but with filtering all it takes to block an image is for the image to seem like child pornography. Whether it is or not is irrelevant. All that matters is the judgment of a private party.
What this incident has also shown is that the IWF appears (as with much of the commercial filtering industry) to be very unprofessional in their behaviour. e.g. It would really help their credibility if before declaring anything "potentially illegal" they got the unanimous opinion that this was the case from at least three firms of solicitors in each of England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Slashdot Mirror
The punishment has to be a bit above the retail price. Limit it to something small, like 3x the lowest street price or some specific number, whichever is higher. Higher for commercial copyright infringement, of course.
Any fixed price is going to wind up being just as unrealistic, sooner or later.
If the liability limit is the retail price, that would kill GNU and similar copyleft licenses.
For a commercial copyright infringer all you'd need to do would be to use the price that infringer was selling at as the starting point.
Actually, there are multiple instances of courts telling the RIAA to stop certain practices of theirs and the RIAA simply ignoring the judge's orders in another court.
But until a judge decides to "throw the book at them" why should they stop?
Now if your ISP got one of such letters, they may have the choice of:
1) sending you an email and asking you to cease and desist in accordance with the request from the RIAA;
2) providing the details to the RIAA and say "your problem";
3) disconnect you and say to the RIAA "problem fixed."
BR>They also have additional options of
4) ignoring the letter
5) invoicing the RIAA for their time
A good start would be for them to publicly condemn acts of terrorism by muslims. Have you noticed that whenever a christian commits an atrocious act in the name of their religion, the pope or someone immediately condemn the act?
The Catholic Church is somewhat unusual in that it has a hierarchical structure.
Though I don't recall any Pope routinely condeming the IRA.
As far as I know, nothing like that has ever happened with muslims.
There is no Islamic equivalent of a "pope" or even an "archbishop".
Aren't name/SSN/DoB/address examples of "something you know"? "something you have" typically refers to physical objects such as dongles and cards.
Rather these are things many people know. Which makes them more suitable as "identifiers" than "authenticators". About the only way such "well known facts" could possibly be usable for authentication would be if fairly obscure ones were picked at random.
and it's not unexpected. If you blow the whistle on illegal activities the perpetrators of the crime will harass you and your family to pay you back.
Or people who see themselves as somehow allied with the perpetrator(s). It appears to be quite a common law enforcement response to "high crimes" to be more interested in persuing witnesses than the actual wrongdoer.
The feds are simply punishing him and his family for outing their illegal activities. nothing different than what the organized crime people will do...
It's also similar to cases of people videoing cops doing something wrong, even illegal. Where the police come up with creative interpretations of "wiretapping" in order to arrest the witness. As opposed to doing anything about the police officer in question.
well except they kill everyone, the Feds are not at that level yet.
Only because too many "suicides" wouldn't be credible.
Society's debt to these people has been paid, and it's time for them to live up to their side of the bargain. If they weren't prepared to do that, no-one forced them to share their work: they could have gone out and got a day job that pays the bills like everyone else, and they could still be living in obscurity and doing that job today like everyone else too.
:)
Thing is that 50 years is already longer than the typical "working life". Just about everyone, if they live that long, has less than 50 years combined in "day jobs" before they retire and draw some kind of pension. Where the amount of their pension is in some way related to the money they earned when they were working. In other words these "artists" would now be drawing their pension in obscurity by now
The writing style sucketh mightily, but the idea behind it is gold. Extending copyright to certain expressions for too long is just plain stupid.
There are a huge number of things which are good in moderation whilst being harmful in excess. Even if moderate copyright was a good thing excess copyright would actually be worst than no copyright.
Time we acknowledge that with a reduction, to 20 years, of copyright.
Or even less than 20 years.
Paul McCartney is worth $1.5 billion. I don't think he'd be hurting one bit if he never released another Christmas album -- ever
Though it might be a good idea for him to avoid marrying any more "gold digging" women...
If the planet was that hard and cool back then how would you explain that the moon got round to? Obviously it wasn't that solid ..
Any object in space which is massive enough is going of end up spherical. Due to the action of its own gravity...
If everything were molten, it wouldn't leave any regions behind, because molten magma/lava would fill in the gouge fairly quickly. Kind of like scooping water out of a bucket doesn't leave a big score; the water level just goes down.
Something which is "fluid" dosn't even have to be in a liquid state. You'd observe much the same with a bucket of sand which was being intermmitently shaken.
But that's the problem. It's exactly backwards. If you teach somebody about computers, they can pretty much teach themselves how to use them in practical application. Primary schools should be starting with fundamental concepts, not middle-management or office-drone routines and habits.
It doesn't work backwards, either. Teaching somebody how to use Word doesn't teach them much about the fundamentals of computing.
It probably isn't even going to be much use using whatever software is going to be around in 10-15 years from now. Whilst there might be some value in older teenage (and above) students learning specific details of currently used pieces of software this isn't education it's training. Training students how to use something which almost certainly be obsolete before they finish their education appears to be rather a waste of time for everyone involved.
The problem is thinking that information can be a physical good. It is not. You can store it on a physical media, but is is never physical by itself.
And this is not as if it were a new idea of yours. It was considered -and rejected, about 2500 years ago. Information, like shape, can be stored or represented on a physical media, but it is not the physical substance on itself.
If people, lacking the technology we now have to record information and move information between different media, could work this out then it really should be a "no brainer" to anyone now living.
Yes, but they don't go around confiscating discs, and writing strongly worded letters.
:)
Or making claims about the legal status of software which they are completly unqualified to make.
Is anyone else reminded of the religous teacher confiscating a biology book from a student, and writing a letter to their pro-evolution parents?
But did this teacher claim that the biology book was "illegal"? Wonder if any science teachers were tempted to confiscate religious texts from students
If I remember correctly, this is roughly what happened next. A day or two later, as I was browsing the Internet with Firefox, an ad popped up saying that they had detected several types of viruses and spyware running on my computer. It then asked if I want to have my hard disk scanned for viruses. I closed the advertisement without giving permission. Then another pop-up, with a progress bar, appeared, which claimed that it as scanning drive C: for viruses. I thought, that was odd, since Linux computers do not have a drive C. Before long, a pop-up appeared which said that Microsoft had detected references to viruses and spyware in my registry. That also seemed odd, since Linux does not even have a registry. Furthermore, I thought, what was a Microsoft pop-up doing on my Linux computer. Besides, at least last that I have heard, there still have not yet been any Linux viruses successfully circulating in the wild.
Finally, they asked me to click on a link and purchase their product, so that my computer could be disinfected. At no point in the process of supposedly scanning my hard disk without permission, did they seem to notice or comment on the fact that I was using Linux.
It wouldn't be that hard for these crooks to have this only happen if you your browser had a Windows user agent string. That they can't even be bothered to do this means that they arn't scared of being caught. That their lies are so obvious should be exactly the sort of evidence that prosecutors should be looking for... Regular con artists tend to be far more subtle with their lying.
The "scan" is totally bogus -- it "ran" in my SeaMonkey browser under Linux and "detected" various infected DLLs. Since I don't have any DLLs on my system, the "scan" is obviously a scam.
As would be the case if it offered to "scan your registry". No doubt even on a Windows system such sites could list DLLs or registry keys which don't actually exist on the system in question.
This is like phishing emails where you may not even have an account with the bank in question and even if you do you never told them that email. Or even someone phoning up, claiming to be your Uncle John who needs money in a hurry. Where even if you actually have an uncle called "John" the caller sounds nothing like them.
Technology such as telephones, email, websites, etc Should be acting as a double edged sword. In that whilst it allows such crooks the the ability to target more people than if they had to physically visit people in order to try and con them, as was their only option in the past. It at the same time tends to leave trails back to the criminals. Thus it should be easier for law enforcement to do something about them. If law enforcement were actually interested in doing so that is...
After all, keep in mind that there were a million people that were esentially tricked into pulling out their creditcard and paying money to these people.
How long should it take for governments (who now own a fair amount of the banking industry) to tell banks to block such transaction? It must be easier for law enforcement to "follow the money" that when it's someone going door to door wanting payment in cash.
Well of course you don't see something like that for an ad. The advertisers are PAYING real money.
Is money which is the procedes of criminal activity "real money" in the first place... What do you think would happen if this money was from a bank robbery, belived to be from selling illegal drugs or from "Internet gambling"? The last time I looked this kind of fraud is against criminal law in most countries.
These kind of crooks should be living in fear of police raids in the early morning or having to be very careful where they travel if they operate from a "safe country". Not court orders to "behave or else we'll tell you again" or even private individuals complaining to their ISP. Similarly advertising companies should expect that they accept money from criminals there will be police taking a very close interest in them and their accounts.
Oddly, the Legalize Cannabis Alliance has been up in arms about this since February
Why is it odd that a political campaign group who's position goes very much against government policy should be concerned about secret blacklists?
Alas, if you give people a lot of power, they will abuse it.
Be it a case of power corrupting or power attracting the corrupt/easily corruptable. The easiest way around this is randomly selected group of people to decide a specific issue. (Often known as a jury.) The power these people have is limited both in scope and duration, so minimal risk of it corrupting them. If selection is properly random you are unlikely to get a group of people who are all corrupt or power seeking.
People actually did this in Finland, and managed to find all the content on the blacklist. They also showed that only about 1% of the blacklist was actually illegal.
Which resulted in the webpage of the person who announced this being added to the list. Both of which indicate that proper oversight is needed.
Even a 1% false positive rate should be considered very poor. Either this list should have been 1% of the size it was or there were a lot of false negatives. The methods used to check the list only identified false positives...
I don't know what happens in the UK and the rest of Europe, but I know here in australia they have already passed an amendment to the freedom of information act to *exclude* the internet blacklist from any FOI requests.
:)
Where are all the "If you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear" crowd? Or have reports of them all camped on Kevin Rudd's doorstep been censored
The thing I don't understand is why they're not targeting people offering real child porn?
It's hard work. Or at least hard work compared with setting up a website and asking people to submit URLs. There probably isn't much in the way of easy detective work.
Last year I gave up moderating a hub on Direct Connect. One of the reasons was I couldn't be bothered banning users who were sharing child porn all the time. I'd come home from work, type in a list a 20 words relating to child porn
How many words are there which are uniquely related?
o That the "blocks" that the major ISPs have in place are effectively useless; either they're incompetent as well, or (more likely) are paying lip-service to the whole idea by saying "yes, we subscribe to the IWF block-list" while using mechanisms a five-year-old could bypass.
They were about as effective as many of the forms of "DRM" used by entertainments and games software industries. Trivial for the people who want to bypass them, whilst causing all sorts of problems for everyone else. About the only good thing is that a few more people may now realise that the same is likely to be the case for the British Government's grandiose ID card idea.
Sometimes (as in the case of dodgy 70s album covers), this seems just a bit of a joke; but sometimes it isn't.
Underneath there is a rather disturbing conspiracy involving ISPs who's customers are a large proportion of the British population to trust the judgment of a handful of people. Something which would be a bad idea even if these people were the most sane and level headed on the planet.
During the early 90s spokesmen for the political wings of the terrorist organisations in the North of Ireland had to be re-voiced by actors, making interviews essentially impossible. I remember one occasion, after a particular gruesome bombing (many innocent people killed) when the spokesman concerned was able to hide behind the actor to get his message across without answering WHY his organisation supported this indiscriminate slaughter.
Almost as soon as this rule was brought in journalists said "This means that that the next time the IRA does something we can't ask Gerry Adams to justify it." IIRC the revoicing by actors was exploiting a loophole in the legislation.
IWF has decided to make an exception for this particular image, but the underlying attitude that led to its blocking remains the same. If not for the public scrutiny this particular decision has prompted, the image in question would still be blocked. I find that very disturbing.
One thing which caused this scrutiny is that the actions taken affected a huge number of people who wern't even trying to view the image in question. (As well as not doing an especially effective job of blocking the image in question.) This would be akin to having police checkpoints on every road into a city because some criminal might possibly want to travel there.
The biggest problem I see with this sort of filtering is the fact that, at least for borderline cases, you rarely know whether the image being blocked is actually illegal.
In this case there appear to have been attempts to make the blocking look like a technical failure.
Usually it takes the due process of law to determine that a person producing an image has done something illegal, but with filtering all it takes to block an image is for the image to seem like child pornography. Whether it is or not is irrelevant. All that matters is the judgment of a private party.
What this incident has also shown is that the IWF appears (as with much of the commercial filtering industry) to be very unprofessional in their behaviour. e.g. It would really help their credibility if before declaring anything "potentially illegal" they got the unanimous opinion that this was the case from at least three firms of solicitors in each of England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.